John Powys - The Brazen Head

Of what happened later, when Bonaventura, leaving the destruction of the Brazen Head to his reckless allies, had honoured and delighted the Prior by consenting to share that epicurean ecclesiastic’s evening meal and to sleep that night under the priory roof, neither the Baron of Cone nor his over-wrought lady could ever get a clear or consecutive account.

It was obviously due to the commonsense and tact — yes! and no less to the courage — of Raymond de Laon that young Sir William was spared any grievous shock, whether to his person, or to his “amour propre,” or to his reputation, in the confused mêlée that accompanied the triumphant departure of the excited bandits of Lost Towers, carrying with them into the depth of the forest the Brazen Head.

They were not as numerous as they seemed to be, nor half as formidable, and they were so proud of being given “carte blanche” to be the violent executioners of the will and purpose of the Pope of Rome that they couldn’t resist shouting and dancing in a wild orgy of excitement round the mysterious object they were carrying.

Many of them waved spears and javelins. Others brandished two-edged swords. A few carried torches, and some had bows and arrows with which they just amused themselves, shooting blindly into the pine-trees above their heads, as if to dislodge any living creature who might be there, whether bird or bat or squirrel or wild-cat, anything in fact that might be up there and could be hit by a random shot. It took four of them to bear the weight of the Brazen Head, which they had fastened with ropes to a couple of fir-poles, and which in the thick grey darkness looked like the head of some colossal decapitated giant whom they had caught asleep.

The confused henchmen of Baron Boncor, who were much better armed, but at the same time much less certain of the reason of their arming, or of the cause of the turmoil, than any other of the groups involved, were endeavouring, in a thinly-dispersed, widely-scattered circle, to enclose the wild men of Lost Towers till they could be assaulted from every side at once and compelled to surrender their animate-inanimate spoil. The formation of this mobile circle had been the plan of Raymond de Laon and it would have been a very good plan if the course of events had followed any sort of rational order. But at that time of night and with no less than three Baronies, each acting like the troop of a separate dominion, events were badly diverted from their logical cause-and-effect sequence.

De Laon himself, armed with a long straight sword, and with a small round shield almost exactly like some of the shields depicted on certain ancient vase-paintings, kept running at full speed round this extended circle, exhorting its human figures to draw in as steadily and resolutely as possible round this dancing and shouting crew of excited bandits.

Young John of the Fortress, who hadn’t been left for long without full information of what was happening in regard to the greatest of all the inventions of his admired instructor, had soon appeared on the scene with a rather eccentric couple of Roque-Manor adherents ready to follow their leader anywhere, but really rather out for adventure than for any particular cause or principle; and all John did was to lead them blindly forward, straight towards the bandits who were carrying the Brazen Head, the appearance of which made the lad think, the moment he caught sight of it under the flickering torches, of the description in the Jewish Scriptures of the “Ark of the Covenant” containing the spiritual presence of Jehovah.

So well had all the Fortress people been trained by their lord and lady to keep an eye on Tilton and John and Lil-Umbra, while they let these young people feel they were completely free to act as they pleased, that the nearer young John — who had no weapon but a peculiar kind of axe fastened to a long pole, a weapon he had invented for himself— approached this thing of mystery, the more closely was he hedged in by two free-men of the Manor of Roque, who were both equally eccentric, but who could at a pinch hoist John upon their shoulders and make off with him.

All might have gone well for the friends and liberators of the Brazen Head; and the madly chanting bandits of Lost Towers might have been put to headlong flight, leaving their projected victim, free from even a single hammer-blow, staring up at his rescuers in divine detachment from his bed upon the silvery-grey ground-lichen, had it not been for one of those annoying accidents that we love to call “ironical”, because by the use of this classic word we endow the antics of acrobatic chance with a conscious flightiness that takes away the shame of our human frustration and defeat.

What actually happened was that at the very moment when young John and his supporters came near to advancing point-blank upon the ruffians who carried the Bronze Head, Sir William Boncor, the youngest belted knight of the longest-reigning monarch in the world, stumbled over a hole in the earth containing the offspring, a male and a female, of the common badger.

These little creatures had been well-suckled that day at noon by their mother; and as a result they crept in a sleepy manner to the mouth of their hole, thinking to themselves that the moment had come for a little independent exploration of the forest; but they felt so satisfied, and so cosy and comfortable, and also so sleepy, that they soon relinquished this desire, and curling themselves up fell into a deeper sleep than they had enjoyed for months.

And it was this happy sleep that was disturbed by the sharply-spurr’d heels of portly little Sir William. These came down on both their little heads, completely separating them from their necks and crushing them together into a pulp of flesh, bones, blood, and bloody hair, against a slab of rock-slate. It was upon this rock-slate thus plastered with a gouache of bones, blood, brains and hair that both the heels of our youthful knight slid awkwardly forward, bringing him down with a mighty crash upon his back-side and extracting from him the sort of indignant and outraged howl against the whole causal sequence of events that had led to this culminating collapse, such as an infant who can run and cry but cannot yet talk naturally utters when brought low.

This event proved to be a turning point in this chaotic skirmish, for it completely brought to an end all further participation of Cone Castle in the confused mêlée. Raymond de Laon, hurrying to pick up the fallen knight, whose howl he knew half-a-mile away, was soon followed by the rest of the Cone party, which was naturally, since it was all happening at the foot of Cone Castle, more numerous than John’s followers from Roque; and the result of this was that the blood-and-dirt-clad bearers of the Brazen Head, still recklessly blundering through the darkness, looking for a rock, or a heap of rocks, where they could smash the Head into smithereens, were only followed with any real obstinate determination by the eccentric couple of Fortress-men who through thick and thin stuck to young John.

John himself was agitated through his whole nature. This was the first time he had found himself engaged in a physical struggle the issue of which, whether bad or good, affected what was the main preoccupation of his life — his devotion to Friar Bacon and his work. The Lost Towers gang were still shouting and jesting and leaping and dancing through the darkness, as they swung the Brazen Head, bound with cords to a couple of poles, from one pair of bearers to another; and every now and then they banged at it with some log of wood they picked up in passing, or with some incongruous piece of culinary iron, that, like John’s own axe on a pole, was in some ways more deadly than an ordinary sword or spear.

They soon had gone so far, and John had had to follow them so fast, that not only was he himself completely puzzled as to the direction in which he was being led, but his two quaint attendants seemed as much at a loss as he was. One of these was a certain red-haired freeman of the manor called Colin Catteract, whose thin body, long shanks and peculiarly malleable physiognomy, instantaneously expressive of every fantasy that came into his head, made him by the destiny of his inmost identity the sort of individual who is born to be a player, a performer, an actor, especially in such a role as a court-clown or king’s jester.